Demonstration of a low loss, highly stable and re-useable edge coupler for high heralding efficiency and low g(2)(0) SOI correlated photon pair sources.

We report a stable, low loss method for coupling light from silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonic chips into optical fibers. The technique is realized using an on-chip tapered waveguide and a cleaved small core optical fiber. The on-chip taper is monolithic and does not require a patterned cladding, thus simplifying the chip fabrication process. The optical fiber segment is composed of a centimeter-long small core fiber (UHNA7) which is spliced to SMF-28 fiber with less than -0.1 dB loss. We observe an overall coupling loss of -0.64 dB with this design. The chip edge and fiber tip can be butt coupled without damaging the on-chip taper or fiber. Friction between the surfaces maintains alignment leading to an observation of ±0.1 dB coupling fluctuation during a ten-day continuous measurement without use of any adhesive. This technique minimizes the potential for generating Raman noise in the fiber, and has good stability compared to coupling strategies based on longer UHNA fibers or fragile lensed fibers. We also applied the edge coupler on a correlated photon pair source and observed a raw coincidence count rate of 1.21 million cps and raw heralding efficiency of 21.3%. We achieved an auto correlation function g H(2)(0) as low as 0.0004 at the low pump power regime.

Fine-grained all-fiber nonlocal dispersion compensation in the telecommunications O-band.

Nonlocal dispersion compensation between broadband nondegenerate photon pairs propagated over fiber corresponding to the ITU-T G.652D telecommunications standard was studied extensively via fine-grained measurements of the temporal correlation between them. We demonstrated near-ideal levels of nonlocal dispersion compensation by adjusting the propagation distance of the photon pairs to preserve photon timing correlations close to the effective instrument resolution of our detection apparatus (41.0±0.1ps). Experimental data indicates that this degree of compensation can be achieved with relatively large fiber increments (1km), compatible with real-world deployment. Ultimately, photon timing correlations were preserved down to 51ps±21ps over two multi-segmented 10km spans of deployed metropolitan fiber.

Satellite Quantum Communications When Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Are Excluded.

An application of quantum communications is the transmission of qubits to create shared symmetric encryption keys in a process called quantum key distribution (QKD). Contrary to public-private key encryption, symmetric encryption is considered safe from (quantum) computing attacks, i.e. it provides forward security and is thus attractive for secure communications. In this paper we argue that for free-space quantum communications, especially with satellites, if one assumes that man-in-the-middle attacks can be detected by classical channel monitoring techniques, simplified quantum communications protocols and hardware systems can be implemented that offer improved key rates. We term these protocols photon key distribution (PKD) to differentiate them from the standard QKD protocols. We identify three types of photon sources and calculate asymptotic secret key rates for PKD protocols and compare them to their QKD counterparts. PKD protocols use only one measurement basis which we show roughly doubles the key rates. Furthermore, with the relaxed security assumptions one can establish keys at very high losses, in contrast to QKD where at the same losses privacy amplification would make key generation impossible.

A privacy-preserving publicly verifiable quantum random number generator.

Verifying the quality of a random number generator involves performing computationally intensive statistical tests on large data sets commonly in the range of gigabytes. Limitations on computing power can restrict an end-user's ability to perform such verification. There are also random number-based applications where an honest user needs to publicly demonstrate that the random bits they are using pass the statistical tests without the bits being revealed. Here, we report the implementation of an entanglement-based protocol that allows a third party to publicly perform statistical tests without compromising the privacy of the random bits.